Living in 1960s Paris and inspired by
moviemakers of the French New Wave, Peter
Lennon decided to make a documentary on
his own hometown, Dublin, Ireland. Though
hed never made a film before, he
confidently asked the eminent cinematographer
Raoul Coutard to film it for him. Coutard
agreed, and Lennon rushed to secure financing
so the film could be shot quickly between
Coutards other upcoming projects
in France.

Lennon was opinionated as to what was
holding back his nation from the promises
of its revolutionary era of forty years
before: the Catholic church and the weight
of its traditions in every aspect of Irish
life. He wanted to express this in the
voices and faces of the Irish people.
Yet besides scenes of schoolboys reciting
the catechism with military precision,
and the opinions of critical Irish intellectuals
(Sean O Falain, Connor Cruise OBrien),
Lennon films a young priest Father Michael
Cleary to let a seemngly progressive person
in the church express himself. Lennon
even gives the last word in the movie
to a sincere, conservative octogenarian
on the film censorship board.

Coutard masterfully films young people
at a party, catching their laughter, glances
and cigarettes. Irish-American director
John Huston, in Dublin to shoot a forgotten
Hollywood product, laments the lack of
a homegrown Irish film industry. Rocky
Road to Dublin was the last movie screened
at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, before
Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut
led a contingent that demanded the festival
close down in solidarity with the students
and workers marching in the streets of
Paris.

The film was shown by student groups several
times during the May 68 upheavals,
and was extremely controversial in Ireland
in subsequent showings on its home turf.
It was restored by the Irish Film Institute
in 2004, by then a center of a national
film industry which serves a less religiously
hidebound nation than Lennon depicted
in the 1960s. In 2004 Paul Duane reunited
Lennon and Coutard to walk the same Dublin
streets and reminisce about the film and
its reception. By then Father Cleary was
remembered mostly for having fathered
two children with his teenaged housekeeper,
and Lennon was relieved to find schoolboys
blissfully ignorant of the catechism.
Taken as a pair, these two films spark
lively discussion of the once-antithetical
concepts of Ireland and progress.